Former State Treasurer Tim Cahill to serve probation, pay $100,000

A Suffolk County judge hasaccepted a civil disposition agreement that ends the case against former State Treasurer Timothy Cahill of Quincy.

Jack Encarnacao

Former state Treasurer Timothy Cahill ended a public corruption case that consumed him for two years by agreeing to pay a $100,000 penalty and admitting he should have known that a state Lottery advertising campaign he authorized while running for governor was illegal.

The agreement, with Attorney General Martha Coakley, was accepted by Judge Christine Roach during a hearing Friday at Suffolk Superior Court in Boston.

“I’m very happy to have this over with,” Cahill told reporters in brief remarks outside the courthouse after the hearing. “I’m very satisfied with the outcome, and hopefully this will be the last time I’ll have to see the inside of the Suffolk Superior Court.”

The Quincy-bred politician was indicted last April on charges of procurement fraud and conspiring to gain an unwarranted privilege from a $1.5 million Lottery ad campaign he authorized in 2010, while he was running for governor. The ads were rewritten to tout the management of the Lottery, which Cahill ran as treasurer.

In the civil agreement, Cahill acknowledges that the timing of the Lottery ads “gave rise to an appearance of impropriety” and that he “knew or should have known, that he was attempting to use his official position to secure for himself an unwarranted privilege of substantial value not properly available to his fellow similarly situated gubernatorial candidates.”

About $600,000 worth of ads were broadcast before Coakley ordered them pulled and began her investigation.

Cahill also acknowledges in the agreement that he did not seek any guidance on a potential conflict of interest from the state Ethics Commission or state campaign finance office before he authorized the Lottery ads, which he admitted promoted a similar message to his gubernatorial campaign ads.

Two of Cahill’s aides, both from Quincy, were also indicted in connection with the case. Cahill’s top aide, Scott Campbell, was acquitted of conspiracy. The chief of staff of the Lottery under Cahill, Al Grazioso, awaits trial on obstruction-of-justice charges.

After a month-long trial and six days of deliberations, jurors could not reach a verdict in the Cahill case and a mistrial was declared. Cahill called the December mistrial “total vindication,” though Coakley still had the option to retry the case.

In a press conference Friday, Coakley said the case will serve as a deterrent to other public officials. She said the public-corruption case was of a type that is difficult to prove because “rarely do they involve a smoking gun.”

“We believe this case had to be brought,” she said. “We believe the evidence was there … I would do again what we did.”

Coakley said she could not estimate how much her office spent on the Cahill case because it was handled by prosecutors who were paid to work on several cases at once.

“There’s no real way to put a cost on that,” she said, adding costs were mitigated because much of the evidence was email records that had been filed in a lawsuit that Cahill brought against campaign staff defectors.

The civil deal places Cahill on pretrial probation for a period of no less than 18 months and no more than four years, during which time he needs to pay $100,000 to the state through Coakley’s office. He has the option of paying the penalty in $25,000 annual increments.

The charges will be dismissed after Cahill has made the payment and served his probation. Per the agreement, Cahill can not run for office or accept public employment during his probation.

Avoiding a retrial and potential guilty verdict allows Cahill, 54, to still collect his pension for his career in public service. That dates back to his tenure on the Quincy City Council, to which he was first elected in 1987.

The Cahill case was the first to be tried under a 2009 amendment to state ethics law, advocated by Coakley, that criminalized gaining an unwarranted privilege if done with fraudulent intent.

Cahill faced five years in prison for each of the four charges against him – gaining an unwarranted privilege, procurement fraud, and two conspiracy counts.

Judge Christine Roach endorsed the agreement as “balanced, reasonable and very much reflective of the realities of the trail we conducted in this courtroom, the mistrial we had, and the potential retrial.”

Prosecutor James O’Brien told Roach he believed “we got the absolute best shake we could from the court and from the jury in this case.”

“If I retry this case, I think there would be no guarantee of what the outcome would be, but I can’t imagine things going any better for any side; for both sides,” O’Brien said. “We are well aware of that.”

Cahill cannot use campaign money to pay the fine. It was not clear, though, whether he can tap a legal defense fund he established last year with the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance.

Cahill currently has $80,600 in that fund, including two $25,000 loans from two relatives and $10,000 from Quincy developer Peter O’Connell.

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